Classic or Professional?
I would recommend Professional, but first, here's some advice if you're new to programming:
DarkBASIC Professional is a great language to learn about programming, but any kind of programming takes effort. There are several tutorials out there that can show you how to do one thing or other, but you will eventually have to break out of those pre-made molds and learn how to coax the language to do what YOU want to do. If you have a game you would like to create in mind, that's a good place to start, but put it aside for now. Chances are it will be a bit over your head for now (ie, a game like GTA, World of Warcraft, or some other professionally produced game). If you start a project that's too much for you at once, you'll increase the likelihood of becoming overwhelmed and frustrated and you'll drop DBPro in search of some other "Easy" button. I'll tell you from experience, they don't exist.
Instead, start extremely simple. I, myself, am remaking Pong at the moment. The trick is to create small projects that (again with some effort) you can complete in a reasonable time. Once you have a complete game that is fully polished, you'll have such a sense of accomplishment, you'll be dying to move on to the next project. It's a great feeling. With these smaller projects, you can get a fundamental understanding of the language while building the skills you will need to tackle bigger things that are closer to the game you want.
Don't get frustrated when you realize that your Pong! game doesn't rival the biggest and best professional game out there. Understand that professional games are the result of dozens of talented people working fulltime for
years. Even if DBPro is capable of producing a high-quality product such as Half-Life 2, do not believe that you will be able to make Half-Life 3 in just a few lines of code and in under a week. Programming is a skill you have to develop and hone over a long period of time. However, even with this reality, game programming can be incredibly rewarding, and some games become enormously popular even though they don't have bleeding edge technology. Look at PacMan, Tetris, and more recently the hundreds of those simple Flash games that have become overnight hits (by the way, DBPro will beat Flash in terms of capabilities every day of the week and twice on Sundays).
With all that said, DBPro is
capable of doing almost anything you have in mind. It supports many of the leading industry gaming technologies like cartoon shading, particle effects, and volumetric lighting to name but a few. Should you actually create something that rivals Half-Life 2 or World of Warcraft, you would probably notice that DBPro is not as fast as those professional games. This is due to the fact that many of the critical parts of professional games are usually coded in extremely fast languages like Assembly that are very close to machine language. As a newcomer, however, DBPro has more horsepower than you will need for quite a while.
'Just one game,' they said, and started to play. That was yesterday.
Dual Athlon 2.0/1GB RAM/GeForce Ti4200-128/Win2000 Pro
